Bank balances are easy. The hard part of tracking personal assets is putting an honest number on things that don't come with a statement: your house, your car, a crypto wallet, a watch or a card collection. Here's how to value each one and how often to update it.
Any personal asset tracker app can pull in a chequing balance. Where people get stuck is everything else they own. What's the house worth this month? Is the car still worth what you paid two years ago? Does a box of hockey cards count? Get these wrong and your net worth can be off by six figures, usually in the flattering direction.
This guide is about valuing assets that don't have a bank behind them. We'll cover what's worth tracking at all, then go through homes, vehicles, crypto, collectibles and a few odd cases like money owed to you and cash-value life insurance. At the end we'll show how to set these up in an app, including Sumyfi, and where its limits are.
Which personal assets are worth tracking at all
Not everything you own belongs in a net worth tracker. Your couch has value, but you'd get almost nothing for it and you're not going to sell it. Including it just inflates the number.
A simple test works: include an asset if you could realistically sell it within a few months, it would fetch more than about $1,000, and its value doesn't fall to near zero within a few years. That keeps the house, the car, investment property, crypto, precious metals and serious collectibles. It drops furniture, clothes, electronics and most jewelry bought at retail.
When in doubt, leave it out. An asset tracker that's a little conservative is far more useful than one that makes you feel richer than you are.
How to value your home in an asset tracker
Your home is probably the largest asset on the list, so it deserves the most care and the least frequent updates.
The best guide is what similar homes nearby actually sold for recently. Asking prices don't count. Online estimates like Zillow in the US are convenient but can be off by a lot for unusual properties, and they move month to month for reasons that have nothing to do with your house. Treat them as a rough check, not the answer.
Then subtract what it would cost to sell. Real estate commissions, legal fees and closing costs commonly add up to around 5%. If comparable sales suggest $640,000, a reasonable tracker value is about $608,000. With a $412,000 mortgage entered separately as a debt, your home equity shows up as $196,000.
Update the value once or twice a year, or after a major renovation. Updating monthly just adds noise that makes it harder to see if you're actually saving and paying down debt.
Valuing cars, trucks and other vehicles
Vehicles are the asset people overvalue most, because they remember the purchase price. A car is worth what someone would pay for it today, and that drops every year.
Look it up on a pricing guide: Kelley Blue Book or Edmunds in the US, Canadian Black Book in Canada. You'll usually see a trade-in value and a higher private-sale value. Use trade-in if you want to be conservative, since that's what you'd get without the hassle of selling it yourself.
Enter the car loan as its own debt. That's how you catch the common trap of being underwater. If the car is worth $21,000 and you owe $25,500, the vehicle is a $4,500 hit to your net worth, not a $21,000 boost.
Leased vehicles
you don't own a leased car, so it shouldn't go in as an asset
Update frequency
once or twice a year is plenty for most vehicles
Boats and RVs
same method, but resale markets are thinner, so stay conservative
Motorcycles
often seasonal, so value them at an off-season price
Tracking crypto, gold and other volatile assets
Crypto is easy to value at any instant and hard to value in a way that means anything. The method is simple: units held times the current price, recorded on the same day each month. The hard part is that a 30% swing in a month is normal, which can bury everything else happening in your finances.
Two habits help. First, track crypto as its own line, so you can see your net worth with and without it. Second, record where it's held. Coins on an exchange are a counterparty risk. Coins in a self-custody wallet depend on you keeping the keys. Neither changes the price, but both matter if something goes wrong.
Physical gold and silver are steadier. Value them at the spot price minus the dealer's buyback spread, since that's what you'd actually get selling to a dealer. A one-ounce coin is worth a bit less to you than the spot price on the news.
Collectibles, jewelry and the odd cases
For collectibles like watches, trading cards, art and coins, use recently sold listings, not asking prices. On eBay that means filtering to sold items. An insurance appraisal is not a sale value. Appraisals for insurance are usually based on replacement cost, which is often well above what a buyer would pay.
If you can't name where you'd sell something and roughly what it would fetch, value it at zero or leave it out. Update collectibles once a year at most.
Money owed to you
include a loan to a friend or family member only if you really expect it back
Business equity
be conservative, since small private businesses are hard to sell
Cash-value life insurance
use the cash surrender value from your annual statement, not the death benefit
Pensions
defined benefit pensions are hard to value, so most people note them separately
Tracking non-bank assets in a personal asset tracker app
Most personal asset tracker apps handle bank and investment accounts automatically and leave everything above to manual entry. Some go further: Kubera, for example, is built around mixed lists of assets and connects to many crypto exchanges and wallets. If most of your wealth is in unusual assets, an app like that is worth a look.
Sumyfi takes a simpler approach. It doesn't have dedicated home or vehicle types, and it doesn't pull automatic valuations or price crypto for you. Manual accounts come in four types (bank, investment, credit card and loan), each with a name, a subtype you type yourself, a balance and a currency (CAD or USD). To track a car or a house, add it as a manual investment account, which is the closest fit, with a subtype like Vehicle or Home, and enter the value you worked out. Add the car loan or mortgage as a loan account. Sumyfi counts bank and investment accounts with positive balances as assets and loans and credit cards as debts, so your equity shows up in net worth.
It's a workaround, not a purpose-built asset register. What you get in return is that those assets sit on the same dashboard as your bank accounts, budgets and goals. Manual accounts are on the free plan. Automatic bank sync through Plaid (read-only) is on Premium, which has a 7-day free trial.
Pros
- Manual assets count in net worth alongside synced accounts
- Free plan supports manual accounts with no card
- CAD and USD values converted to one total
Cons
- No dedicated property or vehicle types
- No automatic valuations for homes, cars or crypto
